Mary H.K. Choi Quotes
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The thing about living in New York as a writer is that you hit that age where it feels like everyone has a book all at the same time. It's like that one year where you're invited to twenty weddings.
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By the time you're in your 30s, unless somebody makes the god-awful decision to gift you with a cooking class or salsa lessons, it may have been a while since you learnt something new.
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The notion of this 'emergency contact' is, Do you have someone who is holding you down? Do you know where to go if you're feeling bad? I keep likening it to assigning yourself a godparent of your choosing.
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The thing about leaving New York is that you can come back.
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Privateers, military contractors - these aren't pirates. They have bosses. Real pirates are sellswords on missions of their own making.
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My sweet spot as a writer and, especially, as an essayist is sub-1500 words.
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Reading aloud to other people is wonderful - if you have people who will suffer it.
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I find texting to be kind of a safe space.
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Never post food on your Instagram. Nobody cares, and only old people do it.
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I love New York, but sometimes New York is so mean to you.
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Pedicures are disgraceful.
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There is so much focus on being self-sufficient, and it makes it very difficult to ask for things. I've been crippled by this notion of high-functioning self-sufficiency. And I see it a lot in younger girls. Asking for help brings people closer in a way that I suspected but didn't actually put into practice.
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From the first time I harangued my mother into buying me a pair of platform sandals at the irascible and persistent age of 11, I've worn heels.
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Jockeying for a popularity position has been a valorized teen tradition since the notion of a discrete teen stage of life was invented.
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'Emergency Contact' is about the anxiousness that is inherent in meat space interactions.
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I roll my eyes at the grandstanding blowhards who have 'fixed' themselves, but I keep up with the gizmos and apps that track people's various rhythms. I'm no lifelogger or body-hacker, but I'm curious, and I want to be in-tune enough to know what's really the matter so I can level up and be at my most awesome.
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'Avatar' is staggering. It's seismic. Evolutionarily speaking, it is cladogenesis in a thunderclap.
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I love small-business owners, and I actually love the idea of vintage clothing, but I don't get when they pretend that the Internet doesn't exist or that other customers have never been to the whole rest of the country where you can rummage around and buy the same dang belt for a buck and a half.
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Join a Bikram-flow-yoga, Flywheel, or Pilates class so you can find spiritual oneness amid grunting socialite moms. Do whatever you want. Just, please, for the love of God, stop talking about it.
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I do not care for musicals. In fact, I hate them.
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Bieber has taste and pull, which is as important to making quality pop as actual talent.
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I cannot quantify the physics of friendships and do not know exactly how much intense pressure can be applied before these glittery, brittle bonds break.
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Texting is incredibly anxiety-laden, but I know people who will have a full-blown panic attack if you call them. I'm one of those nightmare humans where the little mailbox has an ellipsis on it because I have 1000 unread emails. So texting is the most immediate yet least anxious of all the incredibly anxious ways that we talk to each other.
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I love my mother a not-normal amount.